Electronic information is captured for nearly every aspect of one's life, operations of an enterprise, and affairs of governments. This information is gathered, organized, in some cases indexed, analyzed, and mined. Information drives nearly all aspects of modern life. The improvements associated with information gathering, organizing, and analyzing have been further enhanced with the advent of the Internet, the World-Wide Web (WWW), high speed network connectivity, wireless connectivity, and mobile devices that can access networks from virtually anywhere on the globe.
Essentially, information is now omnipresent and available to virtually everyone at anytime from anywhere and at a relatively low cost. These things have dramatically changed the manner in which affairs of individuals are conducted and changed the manner in which business and government operations are conducted.
One issue with data collection is storage space, high availability of data when primary storage for the data fails, and backup capabilities when storage fails to ensure that information is not lost.
In the last few years there has also been a tremendous growth in the collection of unstructured data. While file systems and disks have scaled up to store terabytes of data, backing up this data is becoming increasingly difficult. Though mirroring, snapshots, de-duplication and other upstart technologies have promised a panacea for managing this data, hardcore administrators realize that no technology exists other than a simple backup procedure that can help them against a accidental deletion of important data from a storage device. For example, a simple “rm-rf” operation in a Unix® or Linux® operating system (OS) performed by one with root privileges can literally permanently erase data in an unintended manner or in some cases based on malicious intent. So, backup solutions remain an essential yet neglected piece of the “information explosion” puzzle.
Thus, what are needed are improved techniques for providing efficient backup operations for large file systems having voluminous amounts of data being managed thereon.